24 players named to represent England at this week's Copenhagen Invitational Tournament

Thursday 14th June 2018

9:35 AM

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Basketball England is pleased to confirm the 24 players that will be representing England Under 15s at this year’s Copenhagen Invitational Tournament.

12 boys and 12 girls will be flying out to Denmark this morning for a day of practice before group games begin at 9:00am local time on Friday. Both rosters were selected after a competitive camp at Myerscough College last weekend, with a number of talented players being put through their paces by Head Coaches Manuel Peña Garcés and Cristina Stanciuca.

England’s boys have been matched up in the pool stage with one of the three Denmark national sides, Denmark White, as well as Kenya and TopSportSchool from Belgium. The girls will take on one of the national teams from Iceland and Sweden, with both countries putting two entries into the competition, as well as last year’s winners Csata DSE from Hungary.

“It’s a great experience for this group of players to represent their county at an international tournament,” said Manuel Peña Garcés. “This is the first opportunity within our pathway for players to do that and it helps prepare them for future international level competitions. We want to go there and compete, and we rate our chances of success based on individual improvements that will raise the level of this team. We can’t lose focus that this is still a development year though and more important than the results is the development on offer for this group.”

Cristina Stanciuca said, “We as staff are looking forward to the challenge this tournament brings but most importantly we want to see these players grow both on and off the court. Our last preparation camp showed we can achieve great things if we compete and we are now building on that to create the chemistry that will help us in Copenhagen. This year’s program has already showed success due to the work that all the Regional Performance Centres have done together. We now go into this new adventure and we are hoping to raise the standards even higher.”

The boys’ side have some history in the tournament as they won this competition in 2016 before a 3rd place finish a year ago. The girls claimed 7th last time out, an improvement on their 12th place finish in 2016.

The competition was founded in 2008 with just 8 Under 15 and Under 14 boys team, but has since grown to include 16 under 15 boys’ and girls’ teams alongside the under 14 boys’ competition. With 96 games played across the 3 days, the Copenhagen tournament is now Denmark’s biggest youth basketball event each year.

The schedule for each side in the group stages is as follows (UK time in brackets) :